More than a dozen doctors linked to the Harvard Medical School staged a protest outside the Boston home of Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, demanding the company share its COVID vaccine technology around the world.
According to a report by GBH, demonstrators from the university stood in front of a giant pile of mock human bones placed outside Bancel’s home in the picturesque Beacon Hill district of the city in Massachusetts.
The bones reportedly represented the number of unnecessary COVID deaths being witnessed around the world due to the perceived failure of companies like Moderna to transfer information to countries with the necessary facilities required to manufacture essential vaccines.
Speaking at the rally, Dr. Joia Mukherjee of Partners in Health and Harvard Medical School hit out at Moderna and the role of President Joe Biden in not doing enough to share vaccines globally, saying it was time for people to stand up and say “enough is enough.”
“We have the technology,” she said. “We need to transfer that technology to places that are well prepared to produce vaccines.”
“There are places that have the political will and the ability to do this if only we would share,” Mukherjee added.
“And legally Mr. Bancel’s company must share because they received your taxpayer money to develop this vaccine. And therefore, President Biden has the ability to demand that.”
The Harvard doctor reportedly reeled off a list of countries ready to reproduce the Moderna vaccine, including Peru, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa.
President Biden has yet to compel any of the companies manufacturing COVID vaccines to pass on information.
Dr. KJ Seung from the Harvard Medical School was similarly scathing in his assessment, telling GBH that President Biden was treating the pandemic like a “PR opportunity rather than a global crisis.”
“At the Biden-U.N. COVID summit last week, it was all platitudes, pageantry, no hard plans,” he told the news provider
“Despite calls to scale up production to billions of doses, there was only a commitment by President Biden to donate 250 million [courses of] doses of Pfizer‘s vaccine.”
Dr. Rebecca Zash of Harvard Medical School meanwhile branded plans to donate around 300 million vaccines to low-income countries as simply “not enough.”
“Millions and millions of people are going to die, people that just happen to live in a different country,” she warned.
Both Dr Zash and Dr Seung put this failure down to the Biden Administration to sufficiently increase manufacturing capacity.
Dr Seung said less than 1% of the $16 billion set aside by Congress last March had so far been spent on global vaccine production.
He called on President Biden to push for Moderna to produce 8 billion doses of its vaccine per year by 2022 and up their international donations to 100 million a month.
The protest was the first to take place outside the Moderna CEO’s home and followed on from similar demonstrations held outside the company’s Cambridge head office.
A protest was also held outside the home of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, calling for President Biden to take action.
Newsweek contacted Moderna and Dr Mukherjee for comment.
The call for greater global vaccine distribution comes after a weekend in which more than 400,000 Americans received COVID booster shots from drug stores in the U.S., with 1 million others waiting in line for theirs.
President Biden has previously defended the use of booster shots, insisting his administration can offer a third dose to Americans and still donate vaccine supplies abroad.
Steven Ferdman/Radek Mica/Getty
